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Month: December 2005

A great little short story at Folklore.org explains the origins of the Command key symbol.

“There are too many Apples on the screen! It’s ridiculous! We’re taking the Apple logo in vain! We’ve got to stop doing that!”

After we told him that we had to display the command key symbol with each item that had one, he told us that we better find a different symbol to use instead of the Apple logo, and, because it affected both the manuals and the keyboard hardware, we only had a few days to come up with something else.

Continuing with the recent trend of Mac Tips here at Command-Tab, this is one I recently discovered for Safari. Starting with a window containing multiple tabs, you can close all tabs except the current one by Option-clicking the current tab’s close button. It’s a bit odd, considering a regular click on that very same button will close what you’re viewing, but like most Mac applications, holding Option reverses the behavior. So, if you’re ever looking for not-so-obvious features in Mac apps, hold Option and see what goodies the thoughtful developers coded in for your surprise.

As a bonus, hover over a link and read the text in Safari’s status bar (enabled in View, Show Status Bar; highly recommended to have open). By default, links open in the same tab or window you’re viewing. Now try pressing Command, Option, or Shift and watch the status text change to see the myriad of available options. Try combinations, too!

Firefox has finally reached version 1.5 for all available systems and is a highly recommended upgrade for all owners of this great browser. There are also G4 and G5 optimized versions for those with the appropriate processors. Lastly, John Nunemaker has some tips to make Firefox look more like a Mac application and hide its multi-platform feel (which is about the only drawback making me use Safari nearly full time).

Apple has a great tip on using Smart Playlists in iTunes to make incremental backups of your music, which is a smart move if you’ve invested a lot of time or money in building your digital music collection. Read the full hint